Airports and Air Navigation Services (ANS) providers use surface movement management systems in order to facilitate the safe and expeditious flow of traffic in and around an airport. As should be appreciated by persons skilled in the art, airport traffic includes aircraft, support vehicles such as luggage trolleys, fuel tankers, and passenger busses for example. These systems provide users with real-time situational awareness of traffic throughout the airfield, which includes ground traffic and air traffic proximate to the airfield and structures in and around the airfield. There are two primary classes of known management systems used for air traffic control. A first class includes cooperative systems in which the system relies on the target to report its status, and ultimately its location. A second class includes non-cooperative systems which do not rely on any information provided by the target. Examples of a cooperative system include multilateration (MLAT) and ADS-B, a GPS based system, while examples of a non-cooperative system include surface radar and video based systems.
While surface radar and MLAT systems address a significant component of the ground control requirements, neither system alone provides a comprehensive solution as limitations exist with each system. In the case of surface radar, blind spots, multipathing, antenna period, and clutter tend to affect the usability of the system. In the case of MLAT, any targets not in possession of an active transponder will not be detected or tracked by the system. This is especially problematic for aircraft which turn off their transponders after landing, which renders them invisible to the MLAT system. Furthermore, most vehicles do not have transponders. Accordingly, the information presented to the air traffic personnel can be incomplete or inaccurate, thereby leading to potential safety issues since a properly tracked vehicle or aircraft could be directed to an area where an undetected aircraft may be residing.
The use of complimentary video-based systems for improving the precision of specific airfield areas in order to provide a real time view of these coverage gaps has been proposed. These systems are intended to provide the controller a full, comprehensive picture of the entire airfield surface, thus enhancing the reliability and precision of the overall surface movement management systems.
Video-based airport surface detection systems can also provide real time positional information for airport surface control. Exemplary video-based systems are disclosed in Japanese patent application number JP11160424 and in the paper “Image-Based Automatic Surveillance for Airport Surface” by Besada et al. presented at the FUSION 2001 conference in Montreal, Canada. However since these systems rely on visual input from camera sensors, they can be affected by various conditions such as, but not limited to, low visibility, sensor movement introduced by wind, and low light. In addition to weather, other external factors can affect the quality of the produced data. These factors include, but are not limited to, lens partial and full obstruction and sensor failure. Such known systems cannot compensate for these problems, and are thus not fully reliable. Further, video systems do not integrate well with conventional surface movement management systems, which display information to the user in a radar-track format.
It is, therefore, desirable to provide a system for improving the performance and reliability of an intelligent video processing system.